digging the words into the page sounds adjacent to Seamus Heaney's "Digging" which analogizes writing to digging: https://hypothes.is/a/J-z8OgfQEe-0adtJyXyb3g

There's something here which suggests pens, typewriters, keyboards, etc. as direct extended mind objects as tools for thought. A sense of rumination and expulsion simultaneously.

Pulling this back on topic by querying my own zettelkasten...

I've got versions of most of @Will's excellent list in my notes as well, but here are a few other metaphors (and analogies) which I don't think have been mentioned:

• child rearing; perhaps @Sascha will have an experienced perspective on this now?
• Digestion / Diffusion / Filtering / Distillation
  • Niklas Luhmann compared his zettelkasten to a septic tank. On Zettel 9/8a2 Luhmann called the Zettelkasten "eine Klärgrube" or a "septic tank;" (perhaps even "cesspool"). Waste goes in, and gets separated from the clearer stuff. You put in a lot of material, a lot of seeming waste, and it allows a process of settling and filtering to allow the waste to be separated and distill into something useful.
  • Ruminant machines
  • Barbara Tuchman used the ideas of chewing and distillation
• Grist mills and crucibles
• @Will has previously suggested relationships with flywheels before
• Statistical mechanics
• a "wooden life partner"
• woodworking has been mentioned before, but here's an extended one on wood chips in a workshop.
• Paths through forests
• Thought clouds
• avalanches/whirlpools
• Manfred Kuehn analogizes a Zettelkasten to a library
• idea/index card:zettelkasten :: person:society (see: https://hypothes.is/a/nTNZRGb2EeyZys9wX_gNTQ)
• @Sascha has previously analogized the writing process using a zettelkasten to Henry Ford's assembly line for building cars.
• Humanity is a zettelkasten in biological form.

It's possible that the process of note taking and excerpting may impose levels of analysis and synthesis on their users such that when writing and synthesizing their works that they more subtly expect their readers to do the same thing when their audiences may require more handholding and explanation.

Here, both the authors' experiences and that of the cultures in which they're writing will determine the relationship.

There's lots of analogies between thinking and digesting (rumination, consumption, etc), in reading and understanding contexts.

Source: https://hypothes.is/a/hhCGsljeEe2QlccJUQ55fA

Helbig, Daniela K. “Ruminant Machines: A Twentieth-Century Episode in the Material History of Ideas.” JHI Blog (blog), April 17, 2019. https://jhiblog.org/2019/04/17/ruminant-machines-a-twentieth-century-episode-in-the-material-history-of-ideas/.

In addition to the honeybee metaphor, Seneca compared note taking and collecting sententiae to a stomach digesting food and a choir producing a harmonized sound out of many voices.

(Sources from these last two? Potentially Epistle LXXXIV?)

This could be clearer and "growth state" and "contribution state" feel like jargon which muddles:

two of the broad benefits/affordances of having a zettelkasten: - learning and scaffolding knowledge (writing for understanding) - collecting and arranging material for general output

see also: https://boffosocko.com/2022/04/01/the-zettelkasten-method-of-note-taking-mirrors-most-of-the-levels-of-blooms-taxonomy/

another in a long line of using analogizing thinking to food digestion.... I saw another just earlier today.

machine translation (Google):

But regardless of whether the Zettelkasten resulted in a book, a work, or a thought cloud with varying degrees of precipitation - it is always more than the whole whose parts it has collected. Because there are always other texts in it than those that emerged from it.

There's something romantic about the analogy of a zettelkasten with a thought cloud which may have varying degrees of precipitation.

Link to other analogies: - ruminant machines - the disappointment of porn - others?

Holiday analogizes his reading and note taking practice as a means of digesting books into his note card collection.

Link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/OZ2r9rOfEeu9oFPzd3bMlw - Reader's Digest as a popular example

How do the ideas of "digesting books" and "ruminant machines" relate to the psychology phenomenon of diffuse thinking over time?

ruminant machines is an interesting concept, it sounds like a cross between a cow and Memex.