- Aug 2023
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Zettelkasten in one or several language(s)? .t3_15wo3f2._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
As long as you know and understand what you're writing, use as many languages as you or your zettelkasten wants or needs.
I'm often working with ideas from other languages and cultures which have no direct translations into English, so I use those native words interspersed with English. Sometimes I don't have words in any language and make up a shorthand phrase in English until I can come up with a better word. Often I'll collect examples of the same "foreign" words in multiple contexts to tease out their contextual meanings as was comprehensively done with large group zettelkasten like the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae and the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache. I also frequently use mathematical symbols, equations, and other scientific notations, graphs, drawings, color, etc. to make my meanings clear.
I've also worked with historical figures who have had names in multiple languages over the centuries and cross index them in a variety of different languages based on context. As an example, I've got at least 11 different variations of names for Ramon Llull in almost as many languages and variations of transliterations. I try to keep each one in its original context, but link them in my index.
There are certainly zettelkasten out there written in four and more languages as suited the needs of their users. S.D. Goitein certainly used Hebrew, English, German, Arabic, Aramaic in his and may have likely had other languages (Yiddish, Coptic, Egyptian?) interspersed to lesser extents. Adolph Erman certainly used Egyptian hieroglyphs along with German in his. It can easily be argued that their zettelkasten and work required multiple languages.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180627163317im_/https://aaew.bbaw.de/wbhome/Broschuere/abb08.jpg A example zettelkasten slip showing a passage of text from the victory stele of Sesostris III at the Nubian fortress of Semna. The handwriting is that of Adolf Erman, who had "already struggled with the text as a high school student".
At the end of the day, they're your notes, so write them as you like.
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- May 2023
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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It is unfortunate that the German word for a box of notes is the same as the methodology surrounding Luhmann.
reply to dandennison84 at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/17921/#Comment_17921
I've written a bit before on The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten, the latter of which has been emerging since roughly 2013 in English language contexts. Some of it is similar to or extends @dandennison84's framing along with some additional history.
Because of the richness of prior annotation and note taking traditions, for those who might mean what we're jokingly calling ZK®, I typically refer to that practice specifically as a "Luhmann-esque zettelkasten", though it might be far more appropriate to name them a (Melvil) "Dewey Zettelkasten" because the underlying idea which makes Luhmann's specific zettelkasten unique is that he was numbering his ideas and filing them next to similar ideas. Luhmann was treating ideas on cards the way Dewey had treated and classified books about 76 years earlier. Luhmann fortunately didn't need to have a standardized set of numbers the way the Mundaneum had with the Universal Decimal Classification system, because his was personal/private and not shared.
To be clear, I'm presently unaware that Dewey had or kept any specific sort of note taking system, card-based or otherwise. I would suspect, given his context, that if we were to dig into that history, we would find something closer to a Locke-inspired indexed commonplace book, though he may have switched later in life as his Library Bureau came to greater prominence and dominance.
Some of the value of the Dewey-Luhmann note taking system stems from the same sorts of serendipity one discovers while flipping through ideas that one finds in searching for books on library shelves. You may find the specific book you were looking for, but you're also liable to find some interesting things to read on the shelves around that book or even on a shelf you pass on the way to find your book.
Perhaps naming it and referring to it as the Dewey-Luhmann note taking system or the Dewey-Luhmann Zettelkasten may help to better ground and/or demystify the specific practices? Co-crediting them for the root idea and an early actual practice, respectively, provides a better framing and understanding, especially for native English speakers who don't have the linguistic context for understanding Zettelkästen on its own. Such a moniker would help to better delineate the expected practices and shape of a note taking practice which could be differentiated from other very similar ones which provide somewhat different affordances.
Of course, as the history of naming scientific principles and mathematical theorems after people shows us, as soon as such a surname label might catch on, we'll assuredly discover someone earlier in the timeline who had mastered these principles long before (eg: the "Gessner Zettelkasten" anyone?) Caveat emptor.
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- Mar 2023
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bugs.ruby-lang.org bugs.ruby-lang.org
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Finding good names is quite difficult. Single words are also almost always better than combined names, even though one is a bit limited with single words alone. There are exceptions though. For example .each_with_index or .each_index are good names, IMO.
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Annotators
URL
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- Feb 2023
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forum.obsidian.md forum.obsidian.md
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The ID suffix was added because I use external tools to add notes to my vault so I needed a means to ensure there would never be a collision. For example, Alfred. If I accidentally typed the name of a note that already exists into it I didn’t want it to accidentally overwrite an existing note,
Example of someone ("davecan") with a specific reason for using unique identifiers in the titles for their digital note taking.
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- Nov 2022
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dougbelshaw.com dougbelshaw.com
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The lowest strata represents Generative ambiguity. Here, words are used as symbols for ideas that are very hard to express; an individual gives a name to a nebulous collection of ideas or thoughts. They struggle to make this approach make sense to others.
Generative ambiguity is the process of giving names, potentially tentative, to a nebulous collection of nascent and unclear ideas in an effort to help make sense of them both to themselves as well as others.
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- Aug 2022
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Title for My Book
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...
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- Jun 2022
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Local file Local file
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Are there relevant IPs buried in other projects you’ve worked onin the past?
Sadly, I've already forgotten his self-defined version of IP and I can only think of intellectual property. Is footnote mention linking it to intellectual property certainly didn't help things.
This is part of why using popular acronyms that aren't descriptive or clever is a bad naming practice.
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www.danah.org www.danah.org
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Douglas Adams noted, "Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to."
from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
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- Oct 2021
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github.com github.com
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serverFetch name is unclear. That the docs need to say in bold that it's external is a bit of a code smell.
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Rename to externalFetch. That it runs on the server is already implied by it being located in hooks
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- Sep 2021
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github.com github.com
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I feel like app/packs (or something like it) is a good name because it communicates to developers that it's not just JavaScript that can be bundled, it's also CSS, images, SVGs — you name it. I realize what can be bundled is wholly dependent on the bundler you use, but even esbuild supports bundling CSS. So couldn't this possibly be confusing?
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- Mar 2021
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www.martinfowler.com www.martinfowler.com
- Feb 2021
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www.schneems.com www.schneems.com
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As we know, naming is hard.
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hilton.org.uk hilton.org.uk
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Unlike naming children, coding involves naming things on a daily basis. When you write code, naming things isn’t just hard, it’s a relentless demand for creativity. Fortunately, programmers are creative people.
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If we renamed things more often, then it probably wouldn’t be so hard to name them in the first place.
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We also find it hard to agree on what good names and bad names look like, which makes it hard to know when renaming improves a name.
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This is funny because it’s unexpected. Cache invalidation sounds like a hard thing, while naming sounds more straightforward. The joke works because it violates our expectation that hard things should be technical. It’s also funny because it’s true.
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Anyone who has ever tried to name a child knows that naming is hard. Naming things in code is harder. It’s bad enough that you have to commit to a name that someone isn’t going to like. You also have to be able to live with it.
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- programming
- funny because it's true
- hard to agree on
- good point
- becomes/gets easier with practice/experience
- relentless
- requires/demands creativity
- the activity of _
- hard to determine/recognize if it is better / an improvement or not
- big change/rewrite vs. continuous improvements / smaller refactorings
- good analogy
- surprising
- what programmers are like
- naming things is hard
- refactoring: rename
- well-written
- expectations
- creativity
- frequently encountered (common) problem
- cache invalidation is hard
- creative people
- non-technical problems
- contrast
- creative
- why is it difficult/hard?
- funny because it's unexpected
- naming
- software development
- technical problems
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www.computers.wtf www.computers.wtf
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There’s only one hard thing in Computer Science: human communication. The most complex part of cache invalidation is figuring out what the heck people mean with the word cache. Once you get that sorted out, the rest is not that complicated; the tools are out there, and they’re pretty good.
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- Dec 2020
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github.com github.com
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Maybe something more neutral just meaning a virtual element / no-element container would better express the intention? And regarding the syntax, maybe it would also feel less repetitive / boilerplaty than <svelte:slot slot="name" />... Maybe something like <svelte:fragment slot="name"> or <svelte:virtual slot="name">?
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- Oct 2020
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We could potentially have another flag that was your definition of dirty, but then we run into the hard problem in computer science: naming things.
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- Sep 2020
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github.com github.com
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one problem with 'behavior' is that's the terminology we use to describe all of a component's encapsulated logic — methods, transitions, etc.
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- Mar 2020
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github.com github.com
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Don't be discouraged when you get feedback about a method that isn't all sunshine and roses. Facets has been around long enough now that it needs to maintain a certain degree of quality control, and that means serious discernment about what goes into the library. That includes having in depth discussions the merits of methods, even about the best name for a method --even if the functionality has been accepted the name may not.
about: merits
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- Dec 2019
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babeljs.io babeljs.io
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Part of the issue is precisely around naming things, and as we often hear, naming things is hard.
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