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).

https://pressbooks.rampages.us/msw-research/

Note taking section, particularly here: https://pressbooks.rampages.us/msw-research/chapter/5-writing-your-literature-review/#chapter-285-section-2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbUEa9B0wLM

This appears like it might fit the bill for my Call for Model Examples of Zettelkasten Output Processea

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Eleanor Konik</span> in The Konik Method for Making Useful Notes (<time class='dt-published'>11/07/2022 12:03:38</time>)</cite></small>

I suspect that this example of Eleanor Konik's is incredibly common among note takers. They may have vast repositories of collected material which they can reference or use, but typically don't.

In digital contexts it's probably much more common that one will have a larger commonplace book-style collection of notes (either in folders or with tags), and a smaller subsection of more highly processed notes (a la Luhmann's practice perhaps) which are more tightly worked and interlinked.

To a great extent this mirrors much of my own practice as well.

https://social.ayjay.org/2022/09/27/the-workshop.html

https://medium.com/workings/how-i-take-notes-when-doing-research-90a649f10098

Stowe Boyd looks at Clive Thompson's note taking process which uses Scrivener.

Nothing new here for me.

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/working-remotely

Worth taking a look at the various affordances of folders vs. links vs. tags.

Some of these functionalities may be highly dependent on the particular tool in question and what affordances the tool allows for these ideas.

Has anyone done this comprehensively across a number of tools other than threads in fora like reddit, zettelkasten.de, etc.?

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/vofakc/folders_vs_links_vs_tags/

This completely loses the fact that two different areas of work can be used fruitfully in combinatorically creative ways to expand insight and knowledge. While you can loosely forget what is in your notes, the fact that they exist and are interlinked helps you resurface and reuse them. If you're not reusing and constantly linking them, then you're failing.

Newcomers to note taking practice using tools like Roam Research, Obsidian, Logseq, et al. often see very nice and clean-cut toy examples of note collections which are impeccably linked and maintained. This may also be the case for those who publish their notes (or portions thereof) in public settings on the web. In reality, this sort of rigidness and beautifully manicured practice almost never happens. There are varying levels of messiness in actual people's notes. Beginners should be aware of this and not hold themselves to too high a standard and use this as an excuse not to practice and get their work done.

https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1517207721866452992

It took me a long time (probably more than 7-8 years of working in the industry) to get somewhat decent at capturing notes in meetings.<br><br>How can one get better at note taking? What has worked well for you? What do good note takers do particularly well?

— Shreyas Doshi (@shreyas) April 21, 2022

This question and the responses are an interesting snapshot of note taking practices, particularly for work related meetings.

Some discussion of doing research on zettelkasten methods and workflows.

What do note taking methods and processes look like for individual people?

What questions would one ask for this sort of research in an interview setting (compared to how one would look at extant physical examples in document-based research)? #openquestions

Link this to the work of Earle Havens on commonplace books through portions of history.

An example of a user who is (no longer) centralizing everything into one place. Also an example of a person overloading their use of note taking tool as a melting pot of data. Do they have a mental map of how to separate the pieces to get the value out of their system?

It seems like they want it to "just work" without any conception of what this looks like

Example of someone not using the system as it may have been intended. Visiting one's notes on a somewhat frequent basis should be part of one's regular practice.

If you're not doing anything with what you read, why are you reading it? Similarly, if you're not doing anything with your notes, why bother taking them?

Naturally, creating notes certainly has a valuable use for learning, but to get the most out of them revisiting and linking them has other value, based on one's need.

Missing in this article is a specific use case for why the writer is taking notes at all.

Cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/BuMcAnr4EeyxO-PwNBfPrg (Dan Allosso's analogy about the Kuiper Belt)

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/maps-of-content

Ann M. Blair categorizes four variations of note taking which she calls the four Ss:

• storing
• sorting
• summarizing
• selecting

(In a modern context, one might also expand this to a fifth and include sharing.)