The making of a personal index is a first step in building a mesh of knowledge. In just a few years, Vannevar Bush will speak of "associative trails" a phrase he uses twice in "As We May Think" (The Atlantic, July 1945), but of potentially more import is his phrase "associative indexing" which lays way to either juxtaposing or linking two ideas (either similar or disjoint) together. It bears asking the question of of whether it's more valuable to index and juxtapose similar ideas or disjoint ideas which may more frequently lead to better, more useful, and more relevant and rich future ideas.

It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing. Bush, Vannevar. 1945. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic 176: 101–8. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ (October 22, 2022). #

Confessions of an Office Supply Junky - Episode 5: The Hipster PDA - YouTube<br /> by [[Joe Van Cleave]] video circa 2016<br /> accessed on 2025-09-15T12:38:20

Joe Van Cleave had a pencil box with index cards and a pen with which he used to keep a "Random Access Journaling System, using index cards and topical filing by subject" (dated March 2004). He was using 4 x 6" index cards.

He had a 3 x 5" hipster PDA based on Merlin Mann's idea that had thin metal covers with index cards and a book ring to hold it all together. He used colored cards to create section dividers in his hipster PDA.

He mentions the overlap of the hipster PDA with David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) movement.

JVC started using a hipster PDA in February 2007

He archived them in chronological order.

Grass roots use of the hipster PDA nudged larger stationers like Oxford to make vertical lined index cards specifically for hipster PDAs.

JVC also shows a storyboard done on index cards with two book rings as binding.

Renaissance Art has a 3x5" index card holder made out of leather as a wallet.

JVC was also using a bulldog clip to hold together his index cards.

Casey, Robert S., James W. Perry, Madeline M. Berry, and Allen Kent. Punched Cards: Their Applications To Science And Industry. 2nd ed. 1951. Reprint, New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1958. http://archive.org/details/PunchedCardsTheirApplicationsToScienceAndIndustry.

Begun, George M. “Making Your Own Punched Cards.” Journal of Chemical Education 32, no. 6 (June 1, 1955): 328. https://doi.org/10.1021/ed032p328.

George Begun used a template of "heavy galvanized iron" to drill holes into his 5 x 8" index cards to create his own edge-noted card system for use in his chemistry work. Rather than using commercially made sorting needles, he recommended the use of a ice pick with a dulled point "for safety".

Edge-Notched Cards: A queryable database...made of paper by [[Soren Bjornstad]]

In 1983, at the dawn of the personal computer age, Apple Inc. in promotional film entitled "Lisa Soul Of A New Machine" touted their new computer, a 16-bit dual disk drive "personal office system", as something that would do away with "the cluttered desk, index cards, file folders, the in-out basket, [and] the calculator." (00:01)

Some of these things moved to the realm of the computer including the messy desk(top) now giving people two messy desks, a real one and a virtual one. The database-like structure of the card index also moved over, but the subjective index and its search power were substituted for a lower level concordance search.

30 years on, for most people, the value of the database idea behind the humble "index card" has long since disappeared and so it seems here as if it's "just" another piece of cluttery paper.

Appreciate the rosy framing of the juxtaposition of "past" and "future" jumping over the idea of the here and now which includes the thing they're selling, the Lisa computer. They're selling the idealized and unclear future even though it's really just today.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/189972899/in/album-72157594200490122/

Despite being used primarily as a productivity tool the PoIC system also included some features of personal knowledge management with "discovery cards" and "citation cards". Discovery cards were things which contained one's own ideas while the citation cards were the ideas of others and included bibliographic information. Citation cards were tagged on the 5th block as an indicator within the system.

Question: How was the information material managed? Was it separate from the date-based system? On first blush it would appear not, nor was there a subject index which would have made it more difficult for one to find data within the system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxsCVEBM510<br /> How To Use An Antinet Zettelkasten For Personal Growth by Haile Rene on 2023-12-21<br /> featured on Scott P. Scheper (channel)

Video intro for Soul Cards book...

ugh...

reply to u/taurusnoises (Bob Doto) at tk

Yep, for almost a full year now on 4x6" index cards. (Receipts for the kids: https://boffosocko.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/wp-1688411021709-scaled.jpg)

Previously I'd used a Hobonichi Cousin (page per day) journal for this. (Perhaps I should have stayed with the A6 size instead of the larger A5 for consistency?) Decades ago (around 1988ish?) I had started using a 2 page per day DayTimer pocket planners (essentially pre-printed/timed index cards spiral bound into monthly booklets which they actually shipped in index card-like plastic boxes for storage/archival purposes). Technically I've been doing a version of this for a really long time in one form or another.

It generally includes a schedule, to do lists (bullet journal style), and various fleeting notes/journaling similar to the older Memindex format, just done on larger cards for extra space. I generally either fold them in half for pocket storage for the day or carry about in groups for the coming week(s) when I'm away from my desk for extended periods (also with custom blank index card notebooks/pads).

I won't go into the fact that in the 90's I had a 5,000+ person rolodex... or an index card (in the entertainment they called them buck slips) with the phone numbers and names of \~100 people I dealt with regularly when early brick cell phones didn't have great (or any) storage/functionality.

To avoid the Raiders of the Lost Ark problem, Melissa Rivers donated her mother's joke collection to the National Comedy Center so it would be on display and accessible. The New York-based museum is also home to the archives of George Carlin and Carl Reiner.

Joan Rivers' card catalog of ~65,000 cross referenced jokes will be housed at the National Comedy Center, a museum in Jamestown, NY.

Great example of a historian implying the benefit of not only a card index, but of potentially how commonplace it was to not only have one, but to have stenographers or secretaries to help manage them.

Link this to the reference in Heyde about historians and others who were pushed to employ stenographers or copyists to keep their card indexes in order.

Given the cost of employing secretaries to manage our information, one of the affordances that computers might focus on as tools for thought is lowering the barrier for management and maintenance. If they can't make this easier/simpler, then what are they really doing beyond their shininess? Search is obviously important in this context.

What was the reference to employing one person full time to manage every 11 or 12 filing cabinets' worth of documents? Perhaps Duguid in the paper piece?

Arthur introduces the topic of Robert Pirsig and slips into the GTD conversation on 2004-05-19.

Was this a precursor link to the Pile of Index Cards in 2006?

Note that there doesn't seem to be any discussion of any of the methods with respect to direct knowledge management until the very end in which arthur returns almost four months later to describe a 4 x 6" card index with various topics he's using for filing away his knowledge on cards. He's essentially recreated the index card based commonplace book suggested by Robert Pirsig in Lila.

Zettelkasten, if nothing else, are a close reflection of the interests of the author who collected them.

link: Ahrens mentions this

Nabokov's wishes were that his heirs burn the index cards on which he had handwritten the beginning of his unfinished novel The Original of Laura. His wife Vera, not able to destroy her husband's work, couldn't do it, so the decision fell to their son Dimitri. Having translated many of his father's works previously, Dimitri Nabokov ultimately allowed Penguin the right to publish the unfinished novel.

Unbeknownst to me, I've got a Semantic Scholar author page with an h-index of 4...

https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/C.-Aldrich/34838486

If one thinks of a personal website as a performance, what is really being performed by the author?

Links and cross links, well done, within a website can provide a garden of forking paths by which a particular reader might explore a blog despite the fact that there is often a chronological time order imposed upon it.

Link this to the idea of using a zettelkasten as a biography of a writer, but one with thousands of crisscrossing links.