reply to u/cosmic-magistra at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1g8diq4/any_books_about_how_someone_used_zettelkasten_to/lt4en6f/

Dude, you're taking too narrow a view at what's going on as each person uses the stored work in their particular set of "cards". Everyone is going to be different based on their particular needs. I've sketched an outline of a fairly broad spectrum of users from Eminem (low organization) to Luhmann (high organization). If putting in the level of work Luhmann did upfront isn't working for you, why follow his exact recipe?

Nabokov is an outlier in the larger group. Does he really need a heavily linked system to write what is linear fiction? Did he even need to index his cards at all? Separate boxes per book worked well enough for him, much the way they do for both Robert Greene and Ryan Halliday who follow some of this pattern as well. Nabokov generally did both research on characters and laid out the outline of his plot. Following this he'd dictate drafts to his wife Vera from the cards and edit from there. In '58 Carl Mydans got photos of some of this process. (See: https://www.thoughtco.com/thmb/tlFRyEZcBnGmBDStKWdpR1cXt0Q=/750x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():format(webp)/the-nabakovs-at-work-96793854-468f6ab40e914e45abdd1542fa370872.jpg ) In The Original of Laura, you're seeing the rawest, earliest outline of Nabokov's process. He hasn't gotten to the dictation/typescript level yet. As a result, it's surely not going to make much sense, and assuredly the reason he didn't want it published. Again, you have to either discover or imagine the broader process each person used. If I gave you a similar tranch of Luhmann's cards without any additional context, would they mean much to you? Could you turn them into something concrete without a lot of additional work? Why would you expect the same from these excerpts from Nabokov? This doesn't mean that they don't provide the interested party a window into his work and methods.

Others broadly indexed their ideas as they filed them, a fact which creates the exact links you seem to indicate didn't exist. John Locke's method of indexing was incredibly widespread to the point that at the end of the 18th century, John Bell (1745–1831), an English publisher, mass produced books with the title Bell’s Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke. The notebooks commonly included 550 pages, of which eight pages included instructions on John Locke's indexing method. There are many extant copies of these including one used by Erasmus Darwin, which was bequeathed to Charles Darwin.

OP certainly posed a fair question (and incidentally very similar to one I posed a few years back), but the answer was broadly sketched, so anyone interested in a full answer is going to need to delve a lot further into these examples to be able to get the full picture. I was providing a list of some additional evidence to show there's a lot more depth out there than is generally being talked about. There are hundreds of one page blog posts about Luhmann's method in the last five plus years, but do any of them really encompass what he was doing? Ahrens wrote a whole book about it, but obviously people are still full of questions about the process. I gave less than a few sentences about a couple dozen well-known people as examples, so your expectations may be a little on the high side. It's pretty easy to find my own digital notes for those who want to skip some of the work, but if you want more, you're going to need to do some of your own reading and research. My response was generally to say that, yes, there's some there, there, but as almost everyone here for the last several years can tell you, it's going to require some work and lots of practice on your part to get somewhere with it. There isn't a royal road, but the peasant's path will assuredly get you where you want to go.

Pierre Anton Grillet, in the preface to Abstract Algebra, 2nd Edition (Springer, 2007) said, "Algebra is like French Pastry: wonderful, but cannot be learned without putting one’s hands to the dough." Zettelkasten methods are much the same. 🗃️🥐

Even in writing his book, which takes the form of a numbered and indexed card index, he's making explicit links to the similar card index which he made in volume 1 of the book. It's as if he's created his own hypertext of linked material between the two volumes.

Indexing the world into a commonplace book, zettelkasten, or other means can create new perspectives on the world in which we live. It thereby helps to prevent the sorts of cognitive bias which we might otherwise fall trap to.

This example of Homes indexing crime gives him a dramatically different perspective on crime in the countryside to Watson who only sees the beauty in the story of "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches."

This could be used as a stand alone app for viewing and arranging "index cards" as a digital outliner for organizing ideas.

https://blyt.net/phxslides/

A slideshow could be thought of as an individual playlist or outline for a particular article, chapter, or book.

Phoenix Slides https://blyt.net/phxslides/

via Peter Kaminski:

A fast, free image viewer I use for sifting through thousands of images:

reply to u/ethanzanemiller at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/185xmuh/comment/kb778dy/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Some of your methodology will certainly depend on what questions you're asking, how well you know your area already, and where you'd like to go. If you're taking notes as part of learning a new area, they'll be different and you'll treat them differently than notes you're collecting on ideas you're actively building on or intriguing facts you're slowly accumulating. Often you'll have specific questions in mind and you'll do a literature review to see what's happing around that area and then read and take notes as a means of moving yourself closer to answering your particular questions.

Take for example, the frequently asked questions (both here in this forum and by note takers across history): how big is an idea? what is an atomic note? or even something related to the question of how small can a fact be? If this is a topic you're interested in addressing, you'll make note of it as you encounter it in various settings and see that various authors use different words to describe these ideas. Over time, you'll be able to tag them with various phrases and terminologies like "atomic notes", "one idea per card", "note size", or "note lengths". I didn't originally set out to answer these questions specifically, but my interest in the related topics across intellectual history allowed such a question to emerge from my work and my notes.

Once you've got a reasonable collection, you can then begin analyzing what various authors say about the topic. Bring them all to "terms" to ensure that they're talking about the same things and then consider what arguments they're making about the topic and write up your own ideas about what is happening to answer those questions you had. Perhaps a new thesis emerges about the idea? Some have called this process having a conversation with the texts and their authors or as Robert Hutchins called it participating in "The Great Conversation".

Almost anyone in the forum here could expound on what an "atomic note" is for a few minutes, but they're likely to barely scratch the surface beyond their own definition. Based on the notes linked above, I've probably got enough of a collection on the idea of the length of a note that I can explore it better than any other ten people here could. My notes would allow me a lot of leverage and power to create some significant subtlety and nuance on this topic. (And it helps that they're all shared publicly so you can see what I mean a bit more clearly; most peoples' notes are private/hidden, so seeing examples are scant and difficult at best.)

Some of the overall process of having and maintaining a zettelkasten for creating material is hard to physically "see". This is some of the benefit of Victor Margolin's video example of how he wrote his book on the history of design. He includes just enough that one can picture what's happening despite his not showing the deep specifics. I wrote a short piece about how I used my notes about delving into S.D. Goitein's work to write a short article a while back and looking at the article, the footnotes, and links to my original notes may be illustrative for some: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/14/a-note-about-my-article-on-goitein-with-respect-to-zettelkasten-output-processes/. The exercise is a tedious one (though not as tedious as it was to create and hyperlink everything), but spend some time to click on each link to see the original notes and compare them with the final text. Some of the additional benefit of reading it all is that Goitein also had a zettelkasten which he used in his research and in leaving copies of it behind other researchers still actively use his translations and notes to continue on the conversation he started about the contents of the Cairo Geniza. Seeing some of his example, comparing his own notes/cards and his writings may be additionally illustrative as well, though take care as many of his notes are in multiple languages.

Another potentially useful example is this video interview with Kathleen Coleman from the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. It's in the realm of historical linguistics and lexicography, but she describes researchers collecting masses of data (from texts, inscriptions, coins, graffiti, etc.) on cards which they can then study and arrange to write their own articles about Latin words and their use across time/history. It's an incredibly simple looking example because they're creating a "dictionary", but the work involved was painstaking historical work to be sure.

Again, when you're done, remember to go back and practice for yourself. Read. Ask questions of the texts and sources you're working with. Write them down. Allow your zettelkasten to become a ratchet for your ideas. New ideas and questions will emerge. Write them down! Follow up on them. Hunt down the answers. Make notes on others' attempts to answer similar questions. Then analyze, compare, and contrast them all to see what you might have to say on the topics. Rinse and repeat.

As a further and final (meta) example, some of my answer to your questions has been based on my own experience, but the majority of it is easy to pull up, because I can pose your questions not to my experience, but to my own zettelkasten and then quickly search and pull up a variety of examples I've collected over time. Of course I have far more experience with my own zettelkasten, so it's easier and quicker for me to query it than for you, but you'll build this facility with your own over time.

Good luck. 🗃️

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6jyFE9Ps_Q

Possible example for zettelkasten output project

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3uHeNgy5GM

Possible example for zettelkasten output project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OUn2-h6oVc

an example for https://boffosocko.com/2022/07/12/call-for-model-examples-of-zettelkasten-output-processes/

I'm curious if anyone has ever experimented with making an online Luhmann-esque Zettelkasten using WikiMedia as their platform?

What were the pros/cons you found for doing so?

Have you tried other methods (index cards, Obsidian, other(s)?), and if so what affordances did MediaWiki provide or were lacking for what you were attempting to accomplish?

Did you use transclusion functionality?

Did you attempt to build or implement backlink functionality? Use the API or plugins for this?

Did you build some sort of custom index (manually, programatically, other)?

If you used it for writing, what methods did you attempt with respect to taking the smaller pieces/ideas and building them up into longer written pieces?

Links to specific public examples are welcome here. I'll also accept links to public versions of commonplace books or similar forms which also use MediaWiki as their infrastructure.

syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/144hzn9/zettelkasten_with_mediawiki/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU7efgGEOgk

I wish he'd gotten into more of the detail of the research and index card making here as that's where most of the work lies. He does show some of his process of laying out and organizing the cards into some sort of sections using 1/3 cut tabbed cards. This is where his system diverges wildly from Luhmann's. He's now got to go through all the cards and do some additional re-reading and organizational work to put them into some sort of order. Luhmann did this as he went linking ideas and organizing them up front. This upfront work makes the back side of laying things out and writing/editing so much easier. It likely also makes one more creative as one is regularly revisiting ideas, juxtaposing them, and potentially generating new ones along the way rather than waiting until the organization stage to have some of this new material "fall out".

does my zettelkasten make writing... harder?

Worried about self-plagiarizing in the future? Others like Hans Blumenberg have struck through used cards with red pencil. This could also be done with metadata or other searchable means in the digital realm as well. (See: https://hypothes.is/a/mT8Twk2cEe2bvj8lq2Lgpw)

General problems she faces: 1. Notetaking vs. writing voice (shifting between one and another and not just copy/pasting) 2. discovery during writing (put new ideas into ZK as you go or just keep writing on the page when the muse strikes) 3. Linearity of output: books are linear and ZK is not

Using transclusion may help in the initial draft/zero draft?<br /> ie: ![[example]] (This was mentioned in the comments as well.)

directional vs. indirectional notes - see Sascha Fast's article

Borrowing from the telecom/cable industry, one might call this the zettelkasten "last mile problem". I've also referred to it in the past as the zettelkasten output problem. (See also the description and comments at https://boffosocko.com/2022/07/12/call-for-model-examples-of-zettelkasten-output-processes/ as well as some of the examples linked at https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/)

Many journal articles that review books (written in English) in the last half of the 20th century which include the word zettelkasten have a negative connotation with respect to ZK and frequently mention the problem that researchers/book writers have of "tipping out their ZKs" without the outlining and argument building/editing work to make their texts more comprehensible or understandable.

Ward Cunningham has spoken in the past about the idea of a Markov Monkey who can traverse one's atomic notes in a variety of paths (like a Choose Your Own Adventure, but the monkey knows all the potential paths). The thesis in some sense is the author choosing a potential "best" path (a form of "travelling salesperson problem), for a specific audience, who presumably may have some context of the general area.

Many mention Sonke Ahrens' book, but fail to notice Umberto Eco's How to Write a Thesis (MIT, 2015) and Gerald Weinberg's "The Fieldstone Method (Dorset House, 2005) which touch a bit on these composition problems.

I'm not exactly sure of the particulars and perhaps there isn't enough historical data to prove one direction or another, but Wittgenstein left behind a zettelkasten which his intellectual heirs published as a book. In it they posit (in the introduction) that rather than it being a notetaking store which he used to compose longer works, that the seeming similarities between the ideas in his zettelkasten and some of his typescripts were the result of him taking his typescripts and cutting them up to put into his zettelkasten. It may be difficult to know which direction was which, but my working hypothesis is that the only way it could have been ideas from typescripts into his zettelkasten would have been if he was a "pantser", to use your terminology, and he was chopping up ideas from his discovery writing to place into contexts within his zettelkasten for later use. Perhaps access to the original physical materials may be helpful in determining which way he was moving. Cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/BptoKsRPEe2zuW8MRUY1hw

Some helpful examples: - academia : Victor Margolin - fiction/screenwriting: - Dustin Lance Black - Vladimir Nabokov - others...

She may have some material on her YouTube channel on the zettelkasten output problem.

Based on the dating provided by Anscombe and von Wright, Wittgenstein's zettelkasten slips dated from 1929 to 1948.

for reference LW's dates were 1889-1951

Supposing that the notes preceded the typescripts and not the other way around as Anscombe and von Wright indicate, the majority of the notes were turned into written work (typescripts) which were dictated from 1945-1948.

What was LW's process? Note taking, arranging/outlining, and then dictation followed by editing? Dictating would have been easier/faster certainly if he'd already written down his cards and could simply read from them to a secretary.

Structure notes can take a variety of forms including lists, diagrams, mind maps, tables, and tables of contents.

After you've read a bit you may have some idea of some of the topics you'd like to cover and can begin creating an outline of what you'd like to express. Create a blank page and start the shape of the outline. As you proceed, you'll have an idea of a few specific notes that will fit under individual areas. What are those notes linked to? Perhaps add them as well if appropriate. As you outline you can add markup like ![[noteA]] to your outline which, in preview mode, will render or transclude the contents of that note and any others similarly formatted. Once you've done this with lots of notes you can copy/paste the contents into a draft which you can massage into finished form. Perhaps Obsidian's Canvas functionality might be helpful for you as well for mapping out the ideas/outline? It's at this point that many people realize how useful physical paper cards are for doing this process. The user interface and affordances in this last mile of output with respect to a digital tool is definitely a general drawback. This short video may be somewhat helpful for some of the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI

—Will via https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2519/ideas-im-grappling-with-february-23-2023#latest

http://richardcarter.com/sidelines/converting-my-notes-into-a-chapter/

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.

To test out some potential ideas and flow of a particular chapter for which he already had a corpus of notes, Richard Carter created a mindmap outline of some of his ideas. This in combination with testing out further ideas in his writing journal "three weeks later" caused him to make some significant changes in the structure of his chapter.

Richard Carter uses his writing journal practice to "think out loud" to himself. Often, laying out extended arguments helps people to refine and reshape their thinking as they're better able to see potential holes or missing pieces of arguments. It's the same sort of mechanism which is at work in rubber duck debugging of computer code: by explaining a process one is more easily able to see the missing pieces, errors, or problems with the process at hand.

Carter's separate note taking and writing journal practice being used as a thought space or writing workshop of sorts is very similar to the process seen in my preliminary studies of Henry David Thoreau's work in which he kept commonplace books and separate (writing) journals which show evidence of his trying ideas on for size and working them before committing them to his published works.

Robert Attal's revised bibliography (2000) of Goitein's output lists 737 titles.

https://ias.academia.edu/ShelomoDovGoitein/Articles-&-Reviews

Not sure who compiled this academia.edu profile of Goitein, but it lists a reasonable sounding 800 articles/reviews and 68 books which tracks with the revised edition of Robert Atta's bibliography.

Cards from the topically arranged index cards in Goitein's sub-collection of 20,000 served as the skeleton of his magnum opus Mediterranean Society.

Despite doing the lion's share of the work of linking cards along the way, Scheper shows that there's still some work of laying out an outline and moving cards around to achieve a final written result.

compare this with Victor Margolin's process: https://hypothes.is/a/oQFqvm3IEe2_Fivwvx596w

also compare with the similar processes of Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene

Though to a great extent, his work ethic was really key to his output, something which was facilitated by his method.

Another example of building the myth of the method while sidelining the ethic which could be paired with it.

This generally fits my criteria for submission as an example to https://boffosocko.com/2022/07/12/call-for-model-examples-of-zettelkasten-output-processes/

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/

He highlights this here because it seems convenient to his thesis about a "true way", but Scheper has also mentioned in other venues that it was Luhmann's tenacity of working at his project that was largely responsible for his output.

I believe he made that statement in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgMh6iuFbT4

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>

Throughout this piece Oppenheimer provides examples of notes he wrote which eventually made it into his written output in their entirety.

This has generally been uncommon in the literature, but is a great form of pedagogy. It's subtle, but it makes his examples and advice much stronger than others who write these sorts of essays.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/yd7t7u/creating_a_zk_dont_break_the_chain_calendar_in/\

Much like the way the Obsidian journal plugin counts words within one's daily journal page, this app counts zettels within a folder to help encourage one to maintain some level of output.

I'm curious if this will be an answer to the question I asked in Call for Model Examples of Zettelkasten Output Processes?

https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/pruning-for-output/

In response to my call for zettelkasten output examples, Matthias Melcher comes up to the border of what I was looking for but doesn't cover the actual output portion.

He focuses instead about some of the processing and the pruning portions, but not use for actual content creation. Is this because he doesn't actively use his notes for the creation portion? Or does he use his branching tree space as recollections of notes, perhaps to create outlines for creation?

Note specifically that he doesn't mention any sort of surprise or serendipity with respect to linking ideas nor is there any mention of "inventio" portions of the process.

Ahrens compares the writing output of Anthony Trollope to Niklas Luhmann and suggests that Luhmann wins hands down because the zettelkasten provides some additional leverage above and beyond the basic linear output of Trollope.