actual posted reply to https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1gpx62s/is_a_zettelkasten_a_largely_unknown_form_of/

Taking too narrow a definition of zettelkasten is antithetical to the combinatorial creativity inherent in one of the zettelkasten's most important affordances.

OP was right on track, perhaps without knowing why... I appreciate that you scratch some of the historical surface, but an apple/tomato analogy is flimsy and the family tree is a lot closer. Too often we're ignoring the history of ars excerpendi, commonplacing, waste books, summas, early encyclopedias, etc. from the broad swath of intellectual history. What we now call a zettelkasten evolved very closely out of all these traditions. It's definitely not something that Luhmann suddenly invented one morning while lounging in the bath.

Stroll back a bit into the history to see what folks like Pliny the Elder, Konrad Gessner, Theodor Zwinger, Laurentius Beyerlink, or even the Brothers Grimm were doing centuries back and you'll realize it's all closer to a wide variety of heirloom apples and a modern Gala or Fuji. They were all broadly using zettelkasten methods in their work. Encyclopedias and dictionaries are more like sons and daughters, or viewed in other ways, maybe even parents to the zettelkasten. Almost everyone using them has different means and methods because their needs and goals are all different.

If you dig a bit you'll find fascinating tidbits like Samuel Hartlib describing early versions of "cut and paste" in 1641: “Zwinger made his excerpta by being using [sic] of old books and tearing whole leaves out of them, otherwise it had beene impossible to have written so much if every thing should have beene written or copied out.” (Talk about the collector's fallacy turned on its head!) As nice as Obsidian's new Web Clipper is this month, it's just another tool in a long line of tools that all do the same thing for much the same reasons.

Ignoring these contributions and their closeness means that you won't be able to take advantage of the various affordances all these methods in your own slip box, whichever form it takes. How will you ever evolve it into the paper machine that students a century hence are copying and mimicking and pontificating about in their generation's version of Reddit? Why couldn't a person's slip box have some flavor of an evolving encyclopedia? Maybe it's closer to Adler's Syntopicon? Maybe something different altogether for their particular use?

Those interested in expanding their practice might try some of the following for more details:

• Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know.
• Krajewski, Markus. Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929. Translated by Peter Krapp. History and Foundations of Information Science. MIT Press, 2011. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/paper-machines.
• Wright, Alex. Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. 1st ed. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

For deeper dives on methods, try: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought/tags/note%20taking%20manuals/items/F8WSEABT/item-list

cc: u/JasperMcGee u/dasduvish u/Quack_quack_22

In the video for Walk on Water (2017), a song about art, aging, self-doubt, insecurity, criticism, and creativity, Eminem and his various clones use SMC Classic 12 typewriters to type random words in a nod to Émile Borel's 1913 analogy of dactylographic monkeys with respect to statistical mechanics.

The video closes with Eminem showing typed evidence of his creative genius: "So me and you are not alike / Bitch, I wrote 'Stan'".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryr75N0nki0

Notice the overlap of the dactylographic monkey idea and the creation of combinatorial creativity in Eminem's zettelkasten practice. The fact that he's brilliant enough to have created Stan (2000) is evidence that he's not just a random monkey, but that there is some directed thought and creativity which he has tacitly created during his career. https://boffosocko.com/2021/08/10/55794555/

ideative connectivity sounds fun, but ???<br /> Sounds like a Nick Milo neologism...

potentially a stab at combinatorial creativity?

"History Workshop movement" here (https://hypothes.is/a/pzSbkDSWEe-GVmsfDdhvrg) is another good example of the serendipity of autocomplete functionality in Hypothes.is helping to link together disparate examples of ideas which I'd long since forgotten. In this case to a tangential idea I'd read about a year prior (https://hypothes.is/a/bxMX5MKJEe2Wkq_zinG3iw) and been interested in, but completely forgotten about.

Now I've got a link from that to the founder of the movement in 1967.

brief outline of Raphael Samuel's note taking tools and some scant description of the method.

I love the phrase "scholarly prestiditation" to describe the "magic of note taking" along with the idea of combinatorial creativity.

Presumably the quote comes from the Samuel piece quoted in the article.

It may require having something like "youth spies" to keep up with the more interesting parts of contemporary culture, and these can be used for expanding one's combinatorial creativity horizon.

this example of an autocomplete of 1834 tagging is a spectacular and phenomenally useful example of combinatorial creativity with respect to poverty and historical research... of course, following it along with some useful outcome(s) would add additional power, but even the small suggestion here is spectacular.

https://hypothes.is/a/Gt38VOpFEe6oqSPHU9gL7A

Compare "trust the process" as a guiding principle with "let go and let God" which has a much more random and chaotic potential set of outcomes.

The first part of "sociological imagination" for Mills is what I term combinatorial creativity. In his instance, at varying intervals he dumps out disconnected ideas, files and resorts them to find interesting potential solutions.

https://www.amazon.com/Antiracist-Deck-Meaningful-Conversations-Justice/dp/0593234847

Kendi, Ibram X. The Antiracist Deck: 100 Meaningful Conversations on Power, Equity, and Justice. One World, 2022.

A zettelkasten for creating conversations (randomly) around power, equity, and justice.

machine translation:

The remarkable thing about this statement is that it clearly expresses what we might call, in systems theory terms, the production of complexity by selection. The basic idea is that the Zettelkasten, when set up correctly, must be able to generate much more complexity than was introduced into the Zettelkasten. This is precisely the case if its internal structure, as Luhmann (1992a, p. 66) put it, enables “independent combinatorial performances”, so that what the Zettelkasten has to communicate with each query is always much more than that user himself had in mind.

Perhaps a usable quote to support my own theory, but certainly nothing new to me.

Perhaps some interesting overlap with Ashby's law of requisite variety here? Perhaps an inverse version for creating variety and complexity?

Machine translation:

This aspect was not lost on the educated people of the early modern period. At the end of the 18th century, Christoph Meiners (1791, p. 91) had pointed out that “even the union of as many facts and ideas as have been brought together in complete excerpts [causes] a multitude of combinations and prospects that otherwise never made or received would have".

Find the Meiners reference and look more closely at his version of combinatorial creativity with respect to excerpts.

See: Meiners, Christoph. 1791. Anweisungen für Jünglinge zum eigenen Arbeiten besonders zum Lesen, Excerpiren, und Schreiben. Hannover: In der Helwingschen Hofbuchhandlung.

Machine translation:

In the machine, however, the order of knowledge is broken down into alphabetically ordered entries. That is, there is no hierarchy and no particular structure other than that of the completely conventional alphabetical order. The crucial effect of this dissolution is that combinatorial possibilities increase dramatically and knowledge can react on itself in unpredictable ways.

Cevolini suggests that by removing knowledge from traditional rhetorical geographical commonplaces new combinations of knowledge were more likely to occur. There was no hierarchy other than conventional alphabetical order.

I would suggest that he's on the wrong track as these combinations both then and now could certainly have been done by moving the excerpts around via slips or even looking things up while flipping pages. He also seems to be unaware of Llull's mnemonic techniques which specifically seemed to be designed to increase combinatorial creativity.

suggestion of recombination of individual notes using cards to create something new

(have I remarked on this in krajewski?) ᔥ Johann Jacob Moser commented on the ability to breakdown bodies of information into smaller pieces that might be reshuffled into new configurations as one might in a 'game of cards'.

In Re: to folgezettel or not? in an unlogged chat:

Zettelkasten (slips) or not (commonplaces, notebooks, paper, files, other), you're going to have a variety of related ideas which you'll juxtapose, especially if you're regularly writing. Those who practice folgezettel are putting in some of the work/heavy lifting from the start versus those who don't and are leaving the work until some later point closer to composition. Folgezettel also helps to encourage the emergence of ideas, but requires work to do so. This doesn't mean that this emergence or new ideas may not arrive without Folgezettel and/or Zettelkasten, but one needs to have some process or affordances which help to foster them. Victor Margolin's process put more of his work on the back end in comparison to Luhmann, but his version obviously works all the same. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI

waren. Diese Technik, so glaube ich, erklärt auch, warum ich überhaupt nicht linear denke und beim Bücherschreiben Mühe habe, die richtige Kapitelfolge zu finden, weil eigentlich ja jedes Kapitel in jedem anderen Kapitel wieder vorkommen müßte

Niklas Luhmann's process for writing from his box

Machine translation:

Q: When you start writing an essay, how do you put your note box to work?

I first make a plan for what I want to write and then take out what I can use from the note box.

Q: In contrast to a builder who only assembles prefabricated parts, a scientist must also have new ideas that are not already contained in the individual parts. Ideas like these don't come from a note box?

But. For example, I have a large set of notes on the term "functional differentiation", I also have a set of notes on "self-referential systems", and I have a large set of notes on "binarity". At the moment I am giving a lecture on ecological problems in modern societies, and my work consists of sifting through pieces of paper from the three conceptual areas outlined and combining them so that I can say something substantive on this topic. The new ideas then arise from the different possible combinations of the pieces of paper for the individual terms. Without the notes, just by thinking about it, I wouldn't come up with ideas like that. Of course my mind is required to record the ideas, but it cannot be held solely responsible for them. In this respect, I work like a computer, which can also be creative in the sense that by combining input data it produces new results that could not have been predicted. I think this technique also explains why I don't think linearly at all and why I have trouble finding the right sequence of chapters when writing books, because every chapter should actually appear in every other chapter.

Because Frank Silva was a proverbial slip in David Lynch's living zettelkasten process, he ended up appearing in Twin Peaks by way of the serendipity of Lynch's method of combinatorial creativity.

https://flyingleapgames.com/products/wing-it-the-game-of-extreme-storytelling-1

Recommended by Jesse Stommel.

Creating a "signpost user interface" can help to uncover directions to take in digital contexts as out of sight is out of mind. Having things sit in your way within one's note taking workflow can remind them to either link things, or move in particular directions for discovering new avenues of thought.

Example: it would be interesting if Jerry's The Brain would have links directly to material in Flancian's Agora to remind him to search or find relevant material there. This could help with combinatorial creativity with inputs from others, though it needs to be narrow so as not to result in rabbit holes which draw away attention.

Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/iQvo7l1zEe6dZ5_9d9rrVw

Framing of his book as a remedy to the speed reading fad in the 1970s...

What did those books at the time indicate that their purpose was? Were they aimed at helping people consume more (hopefully with greater comprehension?) while there was a continuing glut of information overload building up in society?

Which is better, more deep understanding of less or more surface understanding of more? How does combinatorial creativity effect the choice?

reply to u/DunesNSwoon at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16ad43u/zettelkasten_alphanumeric_method_vs_alphabetical/

Allow me an iconoclastic view for this subreddit: Given what you've got and your creative use case, I'll recommend you do not do any numbering or ordering at all!

Instead follow the path of philosopher Raymond Llull and create what is sometimes referred to as a Llullian memory wheel. Search for one of his diagrams from the 11th century. Then sift through your cards for interesting ones and place one of your cards at each of the many letters, numbers, words, images, or "things" on the wheels, which were designed to move around a central axis much like a child's cryptographic decoder wheel based on the Caesar cipher. Then move things about combinatorically until you find interesting patterns, rhymes, rhythms, etc. to compose the poetry you're after.

Juxtaposing ideas in random (but structured) ways may help accelerate and amplify your creativity in ways you might not expect.

They meant them to be used on a slower timescale, but Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies are not too dissimilar in their effect. You might find them useful when you're creatively "stuck". As a poet you might also create a mini deck of cards with forms on them (sonnet, rhymed couplets, villanelle, limerick, etc.) to draw from at random and attempt to compose something to fit it. Odd constraints can often be helpful creative tools.

Is the cohesive nature of Hutchins and Adler's enterprise for the humanities and the Great Conversation, part of the kernel of the rise of interdisciplinarity seen in the early 2000s onward in academia (and possibly industry).

Certainly large portions are the result of uber-specialization, particularly in spaces which have concatenated and have allowed people to specialize in multiple areas to create new combinatorial creative possibilities.

How might one use quirky algorithms in interestingly destructive or even generative ways to combinatorially create new things?

as scalable/building on previous knowledge

Does it really?!? When the conversation omits so many perspectives and points of view for lack of diversity, it's also going to be missing quite a lot that one may not anticipate either. It's also likely to go down some blind alleys that may not be as beneficial too.

I quite like the idea of "combinatorial synthesis"as a phrase with relation to the framing of "combinatorial creativity" as an output.

Bob Ross' "happy accidents" tied to the idea of serendipity or the outcome of combinatorial creativity within a zettelkasten.

Ross's version is related to experimentation and the idea of adjacent possible. Taking a current known and extending it to see what will happening and accepting the general outcome. This was one of the roots of his creative process.

@Will Thanks for always keeping up with your regular threads and considerations.

I've been keeping examples of people talking about the "magic of note taking" for a bit. I appreciate your perspectives on it. Personally I consider large portions of it to be bound up with the ideas of what Luhmann termed as "second memory", the use of ZK to supplement our memories, and the serendipity of combinatorial creativity. I've traced portions of it back to the practices of Raymond Llull in which he bound up old mnemonic techniques with combinatorial creativity which goes back to at least Seneca.

A web search for "combinatorial creativity" may be useful, but there's a good attempt at what it entails here: https://fs.blog/seneca-on-combinatorial-creativity/

Will Simpson feels that the magic of note taking stems from "the repetition of adding your thoughts to the notes you take and reviewing notes regularly".

I think it sems more from the serendipitous connections and resultant combinatorial creativity.

Noticing that the title of this isn't original itself (or is it?) There's a similar post entitled "Combinatorial Creativity and the Myth of Originality" by Maria Popova at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/combinatorial-creativity-and-the-myth-of-originality-114843098/

Perhaps the William Inge quote is incredibly apropos here: https://hypothes.is/a/Fvkz-i8rEe2hJYM4oINfpw

via: Didier Eribon, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), vii–viii; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 129f.

Frans Johansson's "Medici effect" which describes innovation arriving from an admixture of diversity of people and their ideas sounds like a human-based mode of combinatorial creativity similar to that seen in the commonplace book/zettelkasten traditions. Instead of the communication occurring between a person and their notes or written work, the communication occurs between people.

How is the information between these people crystalized? Some may be written, some may be in prototypes and final physical products, while some may simply be stored in the people themselves for sharing and re-sharing over time.

The value of a zettelkasten is as a tool to actively force combinatorial creativity—the goal is to create accidents or collisions of ideas which might have a high chance of being discovered and selected for.

Nothing progresses without randomness.

Think about this for a bit. True/untrue? Provable? Counterexamples?

Perhaps of interest here, would not be a specific OER text, but an OER zettelkasten or card index that indexes a variety of potential public domain or open resources, articles, pieces, primary documents, or other short readings which could then be aggregated and tagged to allow for a teacher or student to create their own personalized OER text for a particular area of work.

If done well, a professor might then pick and choose from a wide variety of resources to build their own reader to highlight or supplement the material they're teaching. This could allow a wider variety of thinking and interlinking of ideas. With such a regiment, teachers are less likely to become bored with their material and might help to actively create new ideas and research lines as they teach.

Students could then be tasked with and guided to creating a level of cohesiveness to their readings as they progress rather than being served up a pre-prepared meal with a layer of preconceived notions and frameworks imposed upon the text by a single voice.

This could encourage students to develop their own voices as well as to look at materials more critically as they proceed rather than being spoon fed calcified ideas.

Collecting for collections' sake is a fools errand. Collecting to connect and create is where the magic happens.

What makes note taking exciting?

• serendipity
• surprise
• creativity

The writing of a thesis is a shock to many specifically because information overload has not only gotten worse, but because the underlying historical method of doing so has either been removed from the educational equation or so heavily watered down that students don't think to use it.

When I think and write about "note taking" I'm doing it in a subtly different way and method than how it seems to be used in common parlance. Most seem to use it solely for information extraction and as a memory crutch which they may or may not revisit to memorize or use and then throw away. I do it for some of these reasons, but my practice goes far beyond this for generating new ideas, mixing up ideas creatively, and for writing. Note reuse seems to be the thing missing from the equation. It also coincidentally was the reason I quit taking notes in college.

google translate:

And yet he never found what he was actually looking for, but something new and surprising.

While you'll only find in your zettelkasten exactly what you placed there, you may be surprised to find more than you expected.

If I were going to use an AI, I'd want to plugin and give massive priority to my commonplace book and personal notes followed by the materials I've read, watched, and listened to secondarily.

The engineers behind Wordcraft refer to it "as a 'magic text editor'". This is a cop-out for many versus a more concrete description of what is actually happening under the hood of the machine.

It's also similar, thought subtly different to the idea of the "magic of note taking" by which writers are taking about ideas of emergent creativity and combinatorial creativity which occur in that space.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading

Incremental reading is spaced parallel reading of multiple sources with note taking and spaced repetition.

It's not far from how I read and take notes myself, though I place less emphasis on the spaced repetition piece as I tend to run across things naturally within my note collection anyway.

One of the major potential benefits of incremental reading (not mentioned in the Wikipedia article; is it in Wozniak's work?) is the increase of combinatorial creativity created by mixing a variety of topics simultaneously.

There is also likely a useful diffuse thinking effect happening between reading sessions.

re: https://hypothes.is/a/HqT-lG1fEeqHX7fnzQAfGg

A zettelkasten provides a catalytic surface to which ideas in the "solution of life" can more easily adhere to speed their reaction with ideas you've already seen and collected.

Once combined via linking, further thinking and writing, they can be released as novel ideas for everyone to use.

reply to u/IamOkei at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/10mha0u/what_are_your_goals_for_creating_your_zettelkasten/

The gloriousness of combinatorial creativity!

A good description from Bob Doto.

Peter Hagen, 2022-08-24 https://twitter.com/peterhagen_/status/1562535573134254080

One can dramatically increase their potential combinatorial creativity not only by having their own ideas run into each other, for example in a commonplace book or card index/zettelkasten, but by putting them out into the world and allowing them to very actively interact with other people and their ideas.

Reach, engagement and other factors may also help in the acceleration, but keep in mind that you also need to have the time and bandwidth to listen and often build context with those replies to be able to extract the ultimate real value out of those interactions.

Sascha Fast juxtaposes his new notes with his own favorite problems to see if they have any connections with respect to improving on or solving them.

This practice is somewhat similar to Marshall Kirkpatrick's conceptualization of triangle thinking, but rather than being randomly generated with respect to each other, the new things are always generated toward important questions he's actively working on or toward.

This helps to increase the changes of forward progress in specific areas rather than undirected random progress.

Gian-Carlo Rota (1997): Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught, Notices of the American Mathematical Society 1, 1997, Vol. 44, pp. 22-25.

!!!!

Henry David Thoreau from 1852

How can we better thing of card indexes as positive feedback mechanisms? Will describes it as the "Great Wheel of Positive Feedback" which reminds me a bit of flywheels for storing energy for later use.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTx3G6h2xyA

idea processor as an extension of the idea of word processor

via an anecdotal reply from /deltadeep

Many have frequently provided this advice, but they're missing a number of other affordances, one of the key one's being combinatorial creativity, and this often, because they're not consciously aware of it as a concept or a useful affordance or it's potential outcomes.

Example of Brian Eno using ITunes as a digital music zettelkasten. He's got 2,800 pieces of unreleased music which he plays on random shuffle for serendipity, memory, and potential creativity. The experience seems to be a musical one which parallels Luhmann's ideas of serendipity and discovery with the ghost in the machine or the conversation partner he describes in his zettelkasten practice.

Example of Brian Eno using combinatorial creativity using cards to generate music.

This sounds similar to a process used by Austin Kleon which I've noted before.

https://voiceisalanguage.wordpress.com/2010/04/04/jackson-mac-low/

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.

I love that he points this out explicitly.

Some don't see the underlying processes of complexity within note taking methods and as a result ascribe magical properties to what are emergent properties or combinatorial creativity.

See also: The Ghost in the Machine zettel from Luhmann

Somehow there's an odd dichotomy between the boredom of such a simple method and people seeing magic within it at the same time. This is very similar to those who feel that life must be divinely created despite the evidence brought by evolutionary and complexity theory. In this arena, there is a lot more evolved complexity which makes the system harder to see compared to the simpler zettelkasten process.

https://austinkleon.com/2018/03/04/card-games/

I'm reminded of early French use of playing cards for note taking here...

A game by Austin Kleon for making jam sessions less boring using cards.

Inspired by Oblique Strategies and The Creative Tarot.

https://meso.tzyl.nl/2022/12/04/a-two-month-experiment/

https://www.dalekeiger.net/untitled/

Dale Keiger is tap dancing his way into a definition for the underlying traits for encouraging and expanding on creativity. There's definitely something here worth pursuing further and giving a specific name to.

Some it is very akin to the ideas behind combinatorial creativity of working (dancing in Kelly's case) on the mundane with precision and drive and perhaps at least a soupçon of obsessiveness, but openness to the new.

How can we sharpen this set of ideas to settle on the right list of "ingredients"? Is there a way to hone in on this sort of creation of flow within a certain creative area while simultaneously not getting bored? Is it the small string of creative breakthroughs in the process of practice which open up new avenues and help create the flow to prevent boredom?

How might relate to Anders Ericsson's work on on deliberate practice or plateau principle coming into play, particularly to prevent boredom to encourage one to continue on with their practice?

I haven't put my finger on it but there were hints in it from a Yo-Yo Ma ad for Masterclass I saw the other day (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbjgHkj-syM)..

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

So much to unpack here.

Similar to experiments I've seen by Henry James Korn (esp. The Pontoon Manifesto), John Irwin, etc.

Similarities to means of forcing Llullan combinatorial creativity, but in alternate form.

How does idea density influence the rate of creativity?

What are the thermodynamics of creativity? I've probably got enough material for a significant book chapter if not perhaps a book on this topic.

May need a more public friendly name. Burning Creativity?

New, relatively well-formed ideas may have lost much of their ambiguity to their creators, but they're solid enough to be communicated at scale to others. The newness of the concepts as they're accepted and used by others provides a tremendous level of productive ambiguity as the ideas spread and further solidify and are combined with a broader field of pre-existing ideas.

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.

We don't talk about the art of reading or the art of note making often enough as a goal to which students might aspire. It's too often framed as a set of rules and an mechanical process rather than a road to producing interesting, inspiring, or insightful content that can change humanity.

Robert Green's definition of creativity sounds like it's related to diffuse thinking processes. read: https://billyoppenheimer.com/august-14-2022/

Often note taking, and reviewing over those notes is more explicit in form for creating new ideas.

Come back to explore these.

Regular review through one's note cards is important for the memory portion of directly remembering your insights and received wisdom, but they're also important for helping to allow you to grow them into new ideas as well as combining them with other ideas to allow dramatic innovation.

Increasing the quantity and quality of ideas and materials one has at their disposal when one desires to create something new is one of the reasons for having a note taking system.

memory, learning, sense making, improving understanding, improved creativity, and others are also at play... any others? we should have a comprehensive list eventually.

One's notes are an index of their intellectual progress. In sorting through and re-arranging them one "loosens their imagination".

Keith Thomas indicates that through his personal experience that Beatrice Webb was right in saying that "shuffling notes can be intellectually fertile."

The zettelkasten can be a useful educational substrate for thinking in as few as five cards.

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/Iwy7MGlMEeyztTNgvCXUOA

Barbara Tuchman recommended using the smallest sized index cards possible to force one only to "extract the strictly relevant" because copying by hand can be both "a chore and a bore".

In the same address in 1963, she encourages "distill[ing] from the very beginning, to pass the material through the grinder of one's own mind, so to speak." This practice is similar to modern day pedagogues who encourage this practice, but with the benefit of psychology research to back up the practice.

This advice is two-fold in terms of filtering out the useless material for an author, but the grinder metaphor indicates placing multiple types of material in to to a processor to see what new combinations of products come out the other end. This touches more subtly on the idea of combinatorial creativity encouraged by Raymond Llull, Matt Ridley, et al. or the serendipity described by Niklas Luhmann and others.

When did the writing for understanding idea begin within the tradition? Was it through experience in part and then underlined with psychology research? Visit Ahrens' references on this for particular papers to read.

Link to modality shift research.

Breakthroughs in problem solving and basic research often come from recognizing the significance of overlooked information.

How is this additional information gleaned in these cases? Through combinatorial creativity, chance, other? Can methods for pushing these sorts of additional information be created in the problem solving process?

C. Wright Mills delineates a rough definition of "sociological imagination" which could be thought of as a framework within tools for thought: 1. Combinatorial creativity<br /> 2. Diffuse thinking, flâneur<br /> 3. Changing perspective (how would x see this?) Writing dialogues is a useful method to accomplish this. (He doesn't state it, but acting as a devil's advocate is a useful technique here as well.)<br /> 4. Collecting and lay out all the multiple viewpoints and arguments on a topic. (This might presume the method of devil's advocate I mentioned above 😀)<br /> 5. Play and exploration with words and terms<br /> 6. Watching levels of generality and breaking things down into smaller constituent parts or building blocks. (This also might benefit of abstracting ideas from one space to another.)<br /> 7. Categorization or casting ideas into types 8. Cross-tabulating and creation of charts, tables, and diagrams or other visualizations 9. Comparative cases and examples - finding examples of an idea in other contexts and time settings for comparison and contrast 10. Extreme types and opposites (or polar types) - coming up with the most extreme examples of comparative cases or opposites of one's idea. (cross reference: Compass Points https://hypothes.is/a/Di4hzvftEeyY9EOsxaOg7w and thinking routines). This includes creating dimensions of study on an object - what axes define it? What indices can one find data or statistics on? 11. Create historical depth - examples may be limited in number, so what might exist in the historical record to provide depth.

"loosening my imagination" !!

What a lot to unpack here.

He's actively looking through all parts of his files to find potential links and connections between ideas. He brings up the idea of "unsuspected connections" which touches on Luhmann's idea of serendipity, Llull's combinatorial arts, or what one might call combinatorial creativity.

Note takers reading this may appreciate that Mills had a note taking system:

https://hypothes.is/a/Wbm09giuEe2-tH8vp1LziA<br /> https://hypothes.is/a/_7SQkPdFEeunDX9htFmQ8w

This particular note and my notice of it is an interesting case of faint recognition and combinatorial creativity at play. I vaguely recognized Mills' name but was able to quickly find it within my reading notes to discover I'd run across him and his intellectual practice before.

Heyde indicates how "valuable notes and chains of thought are" but also points out "how uncontrollable and irretrievable" they are.

This statement is strong evidence along with others in this chapter which may have inspired Niklas Luhmann to invent his iteration of the zettelkasten method of excerpting and making notes.

(link to: Clemens /Heyde and Luhmann timeline: https://hypothes.is/a/4wxHdDqeEe2OKGMHXDKezA)

Presumably he may have either heard or seen others talking about or using these general methods either during his undergraduate or law school experiences. Even with some scant experience, this line may have struck him significantly as an organization barrier of earlier methods.

Why have notes strewn about in a box or notebook as Heyde says? Why spend the time indexing everything and then needing to search for it later? Why not take the time to actively place new ideas into one's box as close as possibly to ideas they directly relate to?

But how do we manage this in a findable way? Since we can't index ideas based on tabs in a notebook or even notebook page numbers, we need to have some sort of handle on where ideas are in slips within our box. The development of European card catalog systems had started in the late 1700s, and further refinements of Melvil Dewey as well as standardization had come about by the early to mid 1900s. One could have used the Dewey Decimal System to index their notes using smaller decimals to infinitely intersperse cards on a growing basis.

But Niklas Luhmann had gone to law school and spent time in civil administration. He would have been aware of aktenzeichen file numbers used in German law/court settings and public administration. He seems to have used a simplified version of this sort of filing system as the base of his numbering system. And why not? He would have likely been intimately familiar with its use and application, so why not adopt it or a simplified version of it for his use? Because it's extensible in a a branching tree fashion, one can add an infinite number of cards or files into the midst of a preexisting collection. And isn't this just the function aktenzeichen file numbers served within the German court system? Incidentally these file numbers began use around 1932, but were likely heavily influenced by the Austrian conscription numbers and house numbers of the late 1770s which also influenced library card cataloging numbers, so the whole system comes right back around. (Ref Krajewski here).

(Cross reference/ see: https://hypothes.is/a/CqGhGvchEey6heekrEJ9WA

Other pieces he may have been attempting to get around include the excessive work of additional copying involved in this piece as well as a lot of the additional work of indexing.

One will note that Luhmann's index was much more sparse than without his methods. Often in books, a reader will find a reference or two in an index and then go right to the spot they need and read around it. Luhmann did exactly this in his sequence of cards. An index entry or two would send him to the general local and sifting through a handful of cards would place him in the correct vicinity. This results in a slight increase in time for some searches, but it pays off in massive savings of time of not needing to cross index everything onto cards as one goes, and it also dramatically increases the probability that one will serendipitously review over related cards and potentially generate new insights and links for new ideas going into one's slip box.

What specifically does she define "writing" to be? What exactly is she writing, and how much? What does her process look like?

One might also consider the idea of active reading and writing notes. I may not "write" daily in the way she means, but my note writing, is cumulative and beneficial in the ways she describes in her list. I might further posit that the amount of work/effort it takes me to do my writing is far more fruitful and productive than her writing.

When I say writing, I mean focused note taking (either excerpting, rephrasing, or original small ideas which can be stitched together later). I don't think this is her same definition.

I'm curious how her process of writing generates new ideas and creativity specifically?

One might analogize the idea of active reading with a pen in hand as a sort of Einsteinian space-time. Many view reading and writing as to separate and distinct practices. What if they're melded together the way Einstein reconceptualized the space time continuum? The writing advice provided by those who write about commonplace books, zettelkasten, and general note taking combines an active reading practice with a focused writing practice that moves one toward not only more output, but higher quality output without the deleterious effects seen in other methods.

https://nesslabs.com/combinational-creativity

Interesting papers: - https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Chapter-Thirteen.-Creativity%3A-How-Does-It-Work-Boden/a2c85a054b92b1ccdc325a515b3a3147c02e6880?p2df - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0954406217750189?journalCode=picb

https://lu.ma/w6c1b9cd

[[Anne-Laure Le Cunff & Nick Milo - How can we do Combinational Creativity]]

Details

Date: [[2022-09-06]]<br /> Time: 9:00 - 10:00 AM<br /> Host: [[Nick Milo]]<br /> Location / Platform: #Zoom<br /> URL: https://lu.ma/w6c1b9cd<br /> Calendar: link <br /> Parent event: [[LYT Conference 2]]<br /> Subject(s): [[combinational creativity]]

To Do / Follow up

• [ ] Clean up notes
• [ ] Post video link when available (@2022-09-11)

Video

TK

Attendees

Notes

generational effect

Silent muses which resulted in drugs, alcohol as chemical muses.

All creativity is combinational in nature. - A-L L C

mash-ups are a tacit form of combinatorial creativity

Methods: - chaining<br /> - clustering (what do things have in common? eg: Cities and living organisms have in common?)<br /> - c...

Peter Wohlleben is the author of “hidden life of trees”

CMAPT tools https://cmap.ihmc.us/

mind mapping

Metaphor theory is apparently a "thing" follow up on this to see what the work/research looks like

I put the following into the chat/Q&A:

The phrase combinatorial creativity seems to stem from this 2014 article: https://fs.blog/networked-knowledge-and-combinatorial-creativity/, the ideas go back much further obviously, often with different names across cultures. Matt Ridley describes it as "ideas have sex" https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex; Raymond Llull - Llullan combinatorial arts; Niklas Luhmann - linked zettels; Marshall Kirkpatrick - "triangle thinking" - Dan Pink - "symphonic thinking" are some others.

For those who really want to blow their minds on how not new some of these ideas are, try out Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly's book Songlines: The Power and Promise which describes songlines which were indigenous methods for memory (note taking for oral cultures) and created "combinatorial creativity" for peoples in modern day Australia going back 65,000 years.

Side benefit of this work:

"You'll be a lot more fun at dinner parties." -Anne-Laure

Improv's "yes and" concept is a means of forcing creativity.

Originality is undetected plagiarism - Gish? English writer 9:41 AM quote; source?

Me: "Play off of [that]" is a command to encourage combintorial creativity. In music one might say "riff off"...

Chat log

none available

Interesting to see people talking about these ideas in these spaces. It's too often a missed piece of the puzzle, and is really one of the most valuable parts.

What was the origin of the phrase "combinatorial creativity"? Was if Farnam Street in 2014 https://fs.blog/networked-knowledge-and-combinatorial-creativity/

Some of Anne-Laure Le Cunff's discussion of this in the past: - Building a Creativity Inbox: Anne-Laure Le Cunff & David Perell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTSAuSUxuj0 (taped: June 23, 2020; released: Jun 25, 2020) where the phrase is uased as well as "idea sex" - Combinational creativity: the myth of originality https://nesslabs.com/combinational-creativity (see https://twitter.com/anthilemoon/status/1275820127058120705)

https://www.linkingyourthinking.com/idea-exchange-conference

https://fs.blog/networked-knowledge-and-combinatorial-creativity

Originally published: 2014-07-21T11:45:00+00:00

Is this where I saw the phrase "combinatorial creativity" first?

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?

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.

Like many others, the idea of combinatorial creativity and serendipity stemming from the slip box is undersold.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJLDF6qZUX0

The classic Reece's Peanut Butter Cups commercial (circa 1981) in which a boy and a girl run into each other on the street with the following exchange:

Girl: Hey! You got your chocolate in my peanut butter. Boy: You got peanut butter on my chocolate.

is a good example of the productive collision of ideas behind the concepts of "ideas have sex" or "combinatorial creativity".

https://vimeo.com/729407073

MakingKnowledge: Scott Scheper from Dan Allosso on Vimeo.

Various names Luhmann gives to the effects seen in his slip box: - ghost in the box - second mind - alter ego - communication partner

These are tangential ideas and words which lead up to the serendipity of combinatorial creativity, but aren't quite there.

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/thoughts-prior-to-publishing

I love the pointed focus @danallosso puts on output here. I think he's right that the "conversation between the writer, the text, and their notes" (in my framing combinatorial creativity) is where the real value is to be had.

His explanation of the "evergreen note" is highly valuable here. One should really do as much work upfront to make it as evergreen as possible. Too many people (especially in the digital gardens space) put the emphasis on working on these evergreen notes over time to slowly improve and evolve them and that's probably the wrong framing to take. Write it once, write it well, then reuse it.

Allosso seems to be grasping for the idea of combinatorial creativity here, but doesn't make it concrete or name it the way other authors have in the past (though all different words)

In the 1400s-1600s it was a common desire to excerpt all the value of books and attempts were made, though ultimately futile. This seems to be a commonly occurring desire.

Often having a simple synopsis and notes isn't as useful as it may not spark the same sort of creativity and juxtaposition of ideas a particular reader might have had with their own context.

Some have said that "content is king". I've previously thought that "context is king". Perhaps content and context end up ruling as joint monarchs.

Google translation:

One sees that the material order already sets certain ones points of view ahead and is therefore conditional; only with a clear arrangement of the material will we also vice versa often enough due to accumulating data in a way that we didn't expect at first, in a completely new way points of view of our topic.

While discussing the various orders of research material, Ernst Bernheim mentions the potential of accumulating data and arranging it in various manners such that we obtain new points of view in unexpected ways. This sounds quite similar to a process of idea generation similar to combinatorial creativity, though not as explicit.

The process creates the creativity, but isn't necessarily used to force the creativity here.

While he doesn't point out a specific generative mechanism for the creation of the surprise, it's obvious that his collection and collation method underpins it.

A book with this sentence is just the sort that I'm after.