Julius Reizen in reviewing over Umberto Eco's index card system in How to Write a Thesis, defines his own "insurance card" as one which contains "hard-to-classify thoughts, questions, and areas for further inquiry". These he would keep together so that they don't otherwise get lost in the variety of other locations one might keep them

These might be akin to Ahrens' "fleeting notes" but are ones which may not easily or even immediately be converted in to "permanent notes" for one's zettelkasten. However, given their mission critical importance, they may be some of the most important cards in one's repository.

link this to - idea of centralizing one's note taking practice to a single location

Is this idea in Eco's book and Reizen is the one that gives it a name since some of the other categories have names? (examples: bibliographic index cards, reading index cards (aka literature notes), cards for themes, author index cards, quote index cards, idea index cards, connection cards). Were these "officially" named and categorized by Eco?

May be worthwhile to create a grid of these naming systems and uses amongst some of the broader note taking methods. Where are they similar, where do they differ?

Multi-search tools that have full access to multiple trusted data stores (ostensibly personal ones across notebooks, hard drives, social media services, etc.) could potentially solve the problem of needing to remember where you noted something.

Currently, in the social media space especially, this is not a realized service.

Kaiser's idea of classification work bears close similarity to Mortimer Adler/Charles Van Doren's concept of coming to terms. There are subtle shades between ideas which must be differentiated so as to better situate them with respect to others.

FULL note-taking session for my PhD with DETAILED commentary! by morganeua https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf4T2MuOI8I

https://github.com/flengyel/Zettel

An interesting looking and complete template example.

https://patrickrhone.com/dashplus/

referenced via Simon Woods at micro.camp https://hypothes.is/a/_GvLrPczEe2T-tfEqnLNhw

Jillian Hess noted that Patricia Highsmith uses the German word Keime, meaning "germ of an idea" in her cahiers to indicate ideas which might be used in her novels or short stories.

from Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

Notes can be used for different purposes.

• productivity
• Knowledge
  • basic sense-making
  • knowledge construction and dispersion

The broad distinction is between productivity goals and knowledge. (Is there a broad range I'm missing here within the traditions?) You can take notes about projects that need to be taken care of, lists of things to do, reminders of what needs to be done. These all fall within productivity and doing and checking them off a list will help one get to a different place or location and this can be an excellent thing, particularly when the project was consciously decided upon and is a worthy goal.

Notes for knowledge sake can be far more elusive for people. The value here generally comes with far more planning and foresight towards a particular goal. Are you writing a newsletter, article, book, or making a video or performance of some sort (play, movie, music, etc.)? Collecting small pieces of these things on a pathway is then important as you build your ideas and a structure toward some finished product.

Often times, before getting to this construction phase, one needs to take notes to be able to scaffold their understanding of a particular topic. Once basically understood some of these notes may be useless and not need to be reviewed, or if they are reviewed, it is for the purpose of ensconcing ideas into long term memory. Once this is finished, then the notes may be broadly useless. (This is why it's simple to "hide them with one's references/literature notes.) Other notes are more seminal towards scaffolding ideas towards larger projects for summarization and dissemination to other audiences. If you're researching a topic, a fair number of your notes will be used to help you understand the basics while others will help you to compare/contrast and analyze. Notes you make built on these will help you shape new structures and new, original thoughts. (note taking for paradigm shifts). These then can be used (re-used) when you write your article, book, or other creative project.

Werberger, Raleigh. “Using Old Tech (Not Edtech) to Teach Thinking Skills.” Edutopia (blog), January 28, 2015. https://www.edutopia.org/blog/old-tech-teach-thinking-skills-raleigh-werberger.

link to: https://boffosocko.com/2022/11/05/55811174/ for related suggestion using index cards rather than Post-it Notes.

This process is also a good physical visualization of how Hypothes.is works.

Note-taking techniques I: The index card method<br /> by Raul Pacheco-Vega

What does his full collection look like? Does he have a larger filing cabinet or boxes or are they all smaller modular boxes?

How does he handle the variety of sizes here? Particularly the differences between 4 x 6 and 5 x 8 as it sounds like he may use them similarly outside of their size difference.

Some useful and solid advice here.

https://wildrye.com/let-your-notes-dictate-the-purpose-of-your-pkm-system/

Because reading, annotating/note taking, and occasional outlining and writing can be broken down into small, concrete building blocks, each part of the process can be done separately and discretely with relatively easy ability to shift from one part of the process to another.

Importantly, one can be working on multiple different high level projects (content production: writing, audio, video, etc.) simultaneously in a way which doesn't break the flow of one's immediate reading. While a particular note within a piece may not come to fruition within a current imagined project, it may spark an idea for a future as yet unimagined project.

Aside: It would seem that Ryan Holiday's descriptions of his process are discrete with respect to each individual project. He's never mentioned using or reusing notes from past projects for current or future projects. He's even gone to the level that he creates custom note cards for his current project which have a title pre-printed on them.

Does this pre-titling help to provide him with more singular focus for his specific workflow? Some who may be prone to being side-tracked or with specific ADHD issues may need or be helped by these visual and workflow cues to stay on task, and as a result be helped by them. For others it may hinder their workflows and creativity.

This process may be different for beginning students or single project writers versus career writers (academics, journalists, fiction and non-fiction writers).

As a concrete example of the above, I personally made a note here about Darwin and Lamarck for a separate interest in evolution which falls outside of my immediate area of interest with respect to note taking and writing output.

Summary of Richard Carter's writing process from notes to product.

I've not seen this explicitly laid out as advice before though in most contexts people's note taking spaces have historically been divorced from their writing spaces for publication because slips and notes are usually kept physically separate from the working spaces or finished parts, but Richard Carter specifically separates the digital spaces in which he takes his notes and then uses them for creating end products. While he could both take notes in Obsidian, his tool of choice for notes, as well as write his finished pieces there, he actively changes contexts to use a different digital app to compose his notes into final pieces.

What affordances does this context shift provide? <br /> - blank slate may encourage reworking and expansion of original notes - is there a blank slate effect and what would it entail? - potentially moves the piece into a longer format space or tool which provides additional writing, formatting or other affordances (which? there don't seem to be any in this case aside from a potential "distraction free mode" which may tend to force one to focus only on the piece at hand rather than the thousands of other pieces (notes) hiding within the app)

What affordances does this remove?<br /> - He's forced to repeat himself (cut & paste / DRY violation)

Is it easier or harder (from a time/effort perspective) to provide citations with such a workflow? Carter does indicate that for him:

Having links to original sources in my outline makes the compilation of references for the chapter far easier than it used to be.

There's an interesting parallel between this example and that of the character of Socrates in Plato with respect to writing and memory.

Some take notes to increase understanding, while others might suggest that note taking decreases understanding. The answer to remedying the discrepancy is in using the proper process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYj1jneBUQo

Forrest Perry shows part of his note taking and idea development process in his hybrid digital-analog zettelkasten practice. He's read a book and written down some brief fleeting notes on an index card. He then chooses a few key ideas he wants to expand upon, finds the physical index card he's going to link his new idea to, then reviews the relevant portion of the book and writes a draft of a card in his notebook. Once satisfied with it, he transfers his draft from his notebook into Obsidian (ostensibly for search and as a digital back up) where he may also be refining the note further. Finally he writes a final draft of his "permanent" (my framing, not his) note on a physical index card, numbers it with respect to his earlier card, and then (presumably) installs it into his card collection.

In comparison to my own practice, it seems like he's spending a lot of time after-the-fact in reviewing over the original material to write and rewrite an awful lot of material for what seems (at least to me—and perhaps some of it is as a result of lack of interest in the proximal topic), not much substance. For things like this that I've got more direct interest in, I'll usually have a more direct (written) conversation with the text and work out more of the details while reading directly. This saves me from re-contextualizing the author's original words and arguments while I'm making my arguments and writing against the substrate of the author's thoughts. Putting this work in up front is often more productive at least for areas of direct interest. I would suspect that in Perry's case, he was generally interested in the book, but it doesn't impinge on his immediate areas of research and he only got three or four solid ideas out of it as opposed to a dozen or so.

The level of one's conversation with the text will obviously depend on their interest and goals, a topic which is relatively well laid out by Adler & Van Doren (1940).

Process is important and I suspect we need more concrete examples for people to see. I'm reminded of Andy Matuschak's note taking live stream a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGcs4tyey18 though some editing, time compression, and inserted images can make it a bit more interesting than watching paint dry.

Anecdotally, I feel like mate has become at least marginally more popular in the United States in the last few years, or at least enough to enter the consciousness of the cultural zeitgeist at a liminal level.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Ton Zijlstra</span> in Man at Knowledge Work – Interdependent Thoughts (<time class='dt-published'>05/26/2021 13:35:30</time>)</cite></small>

https://diggingthedigital.com/hoe-werkt-het-maken-van-een-idee-notitie/

Frank calls out what he considers a good example of actual note taking practice rather than the more often seen talk about note taking theory. The example in question is Forrest Perry's YouTube video #9 Zettelkasten: from source card to idea card.

https://edward-slingerland.medium.com/there-is-only-one-way-to-write-a-book-637535ef5bde

Example of someone's research, note taking, and writing process using index cards.

Broadly, this is very similar to the process used by Ryan Holiday, Robert Green, and Victor Margolin.

While he can't recall the name of the teacher, he credits his 7th grade English teacher (1980-1981) for teaching him the method.

Edward Slingerland is represented by Brockman Inc.

Victor Margolin's note taking and writing process

• Collecting materials and bibliographies in files based on categories (for chapters)
• Reads material, excerpts/note making on 5 x 7" note cards
  • Generally with a title (based on visual in video)
  • excerpts have page number references (much like literature notes, the refinement linking and outlining happens separately later in his mapping and writing processes)
  • filed in a box with tabbed index cards by chapter number with name
  • video indicates that he does write on both sides of cards breaking the usual rule to write only on one side
• Uses large pad of newsprint (roughly 18" x 24" based on visualization) to map out each chapter in visual form using his cards in a non-linear way. Out of the diagrams and clusters he creates a linear narrative form.
• Tapes diagrams to wall
• Writes in text editor on computer as he references the index cards and the visual map.

"I've developed a way of working to make this huge project of a world history of design manageable."<br /> —Victor Margolin

Notice here that Victor Margolin doesn't indicate that it was a process that he was taught, but rather "I've developed". Of course he was likely taught or influenced on the method, particularly as a historian, and that what he really means to communicate is that this is how he's evolved that process.

"I begin with a large amount of information." <br /> —Victor Margolin

"As I begin to write a story begins to emerge because, in fact, I've already rehearsed this story in several different ways by getting the information for the cards, mapping it out and of course the writing is then the third way of telling the story the one that will ultimately result in the finished chapters."<br /> —Victor Margolin

It's quite likely that one will take a large number of notes with no immediate goal or plan for use and this is completely acceptable. Often these notes go towards the more immediate goal of forming one's own understanding and setting of a broader tableau for material one will write in the future.

Film making is like note taking

Incidentally, one should note that the video is made up of snippets over time and then edited together at some later date. Specifically, these snippets are much like regularly taken notes which can then be later used (and even re-used--some could easily appear in other videos) to put together some larger project, namely this compilation video of his process. Pointing out this parallel between note taking and movie/videomaking, makes the note taking process much more easily seen, specifically for students. Note taking is usually a quite and solo endeavor done alone, which makes it much harder to show and demonstrate. And when it is demonstrated or modeled, it's usually dreadfully boring and uninteresting to watch compared to seeing it put together and edited as a finished piece. Edits in a film are visually obvious while the edits in written text, even when done poorly, are invisible.

Goutor breaks down the post-processing of notes into two phases: "coding" (tagging or categorization) and "cross-referencing". (p31).

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://twitter.com/shannonmattern/status/1512134425785610255

That stage when you're pretty sure you've finished reading + taking notes, and you're ready to start porting everything over into thematic sections on Scrivener. One of the many stages of writing before The Writing actually begins. T-minus 14 hours 😰

— Shannon Mattern (@shannonmattern) April 7, 2022

Merve Emre's note taking process: dog earing and highlighting followed by typing out sentences and sorting into a rough draft.

Similar to Shannon Mattern's as noted.

"I do not take notes as I read. I dog-ear—verso-top, recto-bottom—and underline sentences + paragraphs. I create a document and type out every underlined sentence and paragraph, sorted by book. Then I create a second document + sort the sentences + paragraphs by subject...."

— Shannon Mattern (@shannonmattern) April 16, 2022

"... The process of doing this usually gets me to a preliminary articulation of the argument I want to make, its beginning and its end, its arc, and its subclaims." How affirming - this is my process, too! // All of this is from a lovely @nybooks email interview with @mervatim pic.twitter.com/iAF82mo5MI

— Shannon Mattern (@shannonmattern) April 16, 2022

Just as physics and engineering professors don't always rely on the mathematics department to teach all the mathematics that students should know, neither should any department rely on the English department to teach students how to take notes.

One can't help but notice that Dutcher's essay, laid out like it is in a numbered fashion with one or two paragraphs each may stem from the fact of his using his own note taking method.

Each section seems to have it's own headword followed by pre-written notes in much the same way he indicates one should take notes in part 18.

It could be illustrative to count the number of paragraphs in each numbered section. Skimming, most are just a paragraph or two at most while a few do go as high as 5 or 6 though these are rarer. A preponderance of shorter one or two paragraphs that fill a single 3x5" card would tend to more directly support the claim. Though it is also the case that one could have multiple attached cards on a single idea. In Dutcher's case it's possible that these were paperclipped or stapled together (does he mention using one side of the slip only, which is somewhat common in this area of literature on note making?). It seems reasonably obvious that he's not doing more complex numbering or ordering the way Luhmann did, but he does seem to be actively using it to create and guide his output directly in a way (and even publishing it as such) that supports his method.

Is this then evidence for his own practice? He does actively mention in several places links to section numbers where he also cross references ideas in one card to ideas in another, thereby creating a network of related ideas even within the subject heading of his overall essay title.

Here it would be very valuable to see his note collection directly or be able to compare this 1927 version to an earlier 1908 version which he mentions.

https://maggieappleton.com/daily-notes

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/announcing-how-to-make-notes-and

Congratulations @danallosso!

Similar to Beatrice Webb's definition of synthetic notes in My Apprentice (1926), thought this also includes movement into actually drafting writing.

What year was this written?

The idea here seems to be less discrete in the steps of the writing process and subsumes multiple things instead of breaking them into discrete conceptual parts. Has this been some of what has caused issues in the note taking to creation process in the last century?

Stephen Downes describes some of his note taking process for creation here. He doesn't actively reuse his notes (or in this case blog posts, bookmarks, etc.) which number a sizeable 35669, directly, at least in the sort of cut and paste method suggested by Sönke Ahrens. Rather he follows a sort of broad idea, outline creation, and search plan akin to that described by Cory Doctorow in 20 years a blogger

Link to: - https://hyp.is/_XgTCm9GEeyn4Dv6eR9ypw/pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/

Downes suggests that the "magic happens in the creation" of his notes. He uses them as "grist for pattern recognition". He doesn't mention words like surprise or serendipity coming from his notes by linking them, though he does use them "intuitively to form overarching themes or concepts not actually contained in the resources themselves." This is closely akin to the broader ideas ensconced in inventio, Llullan Wheels, triangle thinking, ideas have sex, combinatorial creativity, serendipity (Luhmann), insight, etc. which have been described by others.

Note that Downes indicates that his brain creates the links and he doesn't rely on his software to do this. The break is compounded by the fact that he doesn't find value in classifying or categorizing his notes.

I appreciate that Downes uses the word "grist" to describe part of his note taking practice which evokes the idea of grinding up complex ideas (the grain) to sort out the portions of the whole to find simpler ideas (the flour) which one might use later to combine to make new ideas (bread, cake, etc.) Similar analogies might be had in the grain harvesting space including winnowing or threshing.

One can compare this use of a grist mill analogy of thinking with the analogy of the crucible, which implies a chamber or space in which elements are brought together often with work or extreme conditions to create new products by their combination.

Of course these also follow the older classical analogy of imitating the bees (apes).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7XbgD4VVa4

Matthias Melcher's note taking process. Quick capture as text. Linking and categorizing later, and then import into a private WordPress space.

No indication here what happens after, though ostensibly some of it is covered here: https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/pruning-for-output/

Compass Points, a routine for examining propositions.

via https://pz.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Compass%20Points_0.pdf

• E- excited
• W- worrisome
• N - need to know
• S - stance or suggestion for moving forward

These could be used as a simple set of rules for thumb for evaluating and expanding on ideas in note taking or social annotation settings.

Compare these with the suggestions of Tiago Forte in his book Building a Second Brain. Which is better? More comprehensive? Are there any ideas missing in a broader conceptualization? Is there a better acronymization or analogy for such a technique?

Of course they'll struggle here because now they must recontextualize a huge amount of work and fill in all the details with things they might have also collected and linked previously.

By writing down and collecting ideas slowly over time, working on them in small fits and spurts, when one finally comes to do the final work on their writing project or other work, the pieces only need minor shaping to take their final form. This process allows for a much greater level of serendipity, creativity, and potential sustained genius of connecting ideas across time to take shape in a final piece.

How does this relate to diffuse thinking? How can slow diffuse thinking be leveraged into this process?

Writing down fleeting notes while walking around can be valuable as one's ideas brew slowly in the mind (diffuse thinking) in combination with active combinatorial creativity, thus a form of Llullan combinatorial diffusion.

Many business books seem so shallow and often only have one real insight which is repeated multiple times, perhaps to drive the point home or perhaps just to have enough filler to seem being worth the purchase of a book.

Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich is an example of this, though it shows a different form of genius in expanding the idea from a variety of perspectives so that eventually everyone will absorb the broader idea which is distilled to great effect into the title.

Steven Johnson indicates that the word processor is a terrible tool for writing because it doesn't have usable affordances for building up longer pieces from one's notes or basic ideas.

He discusses his specific workflow of note taking and keeping ideas in Scrivener where he arranges them into folders and outlines which then become the source of his writing.

Different from the typical zettelkasten workflow, he's keeping his notes hierarchically organized in folders based on topic keywords and only later when creating a specific writing project making explicit links and orders between his notes to create longer pieces. It's here that his work diverges most dramatically to the zettelkasten method described by Sönke Ahrens.

Ahrens looks at the discrete steps of writing a paper or book in reverse order... all the way back to creating the initial notes and ideas. By framing it this way, he shows the value of note taking as a means of making the entire enterprise so much easier.

https://kimberlyhirsh.com/2018/06/29/a-starttofinish-literature.html

Great overview of a literature review with some useful looking links to more specifics on note taking methods.

Most of the newer note taking tools like Roam Research, Obsidian, etc. were not available or out when she wrote this. I'm curious how these may have changed or modified her perspective versus some of the other catch-as-catch-can methods with pen/paper/index cards/digital apps?

https://kimberlyhirsh.com/2019/04/01/dissertating-in-the.html

A description of some of Kimiberly Hirsh's workflow in keeping a public research notebook (or commonplace book).

I'd be curious to know what type of readership and response she's gotten from this work in the past. For some it'll bet it's possibly too niche for a lot of direct feedback, but some pieces may be more interesting than others.

Did it help her organize her thoughts and reuse the material later on?

In the attached YouTube video Dan talks through his post as usual, but he has the added bonus here of showing a split screen of his annotated copy of the book with his Obsidian notebook open. We then see a real time transcription of his note taking process of moving from scant highlights in the book to more fleshed out thoughts and notes in his notebook. We also see him cross referencing various materials for alternate definitions and resources.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HBL-c_nXXQ

Others on the page here (specifically Dpthomas87's A, B, C) have done a great job at outlining their methods which I'm generally following. So I'll focus a bit more on the mechanics.

I rely pretty heavily on Hypothes.is for most of my note taking, highlights, and annotations. This works whether a paper is online or as a pdf I read online or store locally and annotate there.

Then I use RSS to pipe my data from Hypothes.is into a text file in OneDrive for my Obsidian vault using IFTTT.com. I know that a few are writing code for the Hypothes.is API to port data directly into Roam Research presently; I hope others might do it for Obsidian as well.)

Often at the end of the day or end of the week, I'll go through my drafts folder everything is in to review things, do some light formatting and add links, tags, or other meta data and links to related ideas.

Using Hypothes.is helps me get material into the system pretty quickly without a lot of transcription (which doesn't help my memory or retention). And the end of the day or end of week review helps reinforce things as well as help to surface other connections.

I'm hoping that as more people use Hypothesis for social annotation, the cross conversations will also be a source of more helpful cross-linking of ideas and thought.

I prefer to keep my notes as atomic as I can.

For some smaller self-contained things like lectures, I may keep a handful of notes together rather than splitting them apart, but they may be linked to larger structures like longer courses or topics of study.

If an article only has one or two annotations I'll keep them together in the same note, but books more often have dozens or hundreds of notes which I keep in separate files.

For those who don't have a clear idea of what or why they're doing this, I highly recommend reading [[Sönke Ahrens]]' book Smart Notes.

I do have a handful of templates for books, articles, and zettels to help in prompting me to fill in appropriate meta data for various notes more quickly. For this I'm using the built-in Templates plug-in and then ctrl-shift-T to choose a specific template as necessary.

Often I'll use Hypothes.is and tag things as #WantToRead to quickly bookmark things into my vault for later thought, reading, or processing.

For online videos and lectures, I'll often dump YouTube URLs into https://docdrop.org/, which then gives a side by side transcript for more easily jumping around as well as annotating directly from the transcript if I choose.

I prefer to use [[links]] over #tags for connecting information. Most of the tags I use tend to be for organizational or more personal purposes like #WantToRead which I later delete when done.

When I run across interesting questions or topics that would make good papers or areas of future research I'll use a tag like #OpenQuestion, so when I'm bored I can look at a list of what I might like to work on next.

Syndicated copies: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/research-phd-academics/1446/64?u=chrisaldrich