Is it possible to be above one's own system of beliefs and ideas? Doesn't the system make them a product of it? Evolving from a base at best?

The idea sounds lovely, but is it possible anthropologically?

Taixu

Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, writer, politician, and linguist, was imprisoned from 1926 until his death in 1937 as a vocal critic of Benito Mussolini. While in prison he wrote more than 3,000 pages in more than 30 notebooks. His Prison Notebooks comprise a fascinating contribution to political theory.

The Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache was an international collaborative zettelkasten project begun in 1897 and finally published as five volumes in 1926.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%B6rterbuch_der_%C3%A4gyptischen_Sprache

Heyde, Johannes Erich. Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens. (Sektion 1.2 Die Kartei) Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1931.

annotation target: urn:x-pdf:00126394ba28043d68444144cd504562

(Unknown translation from German into English. v1 TK)

The overall title of the work (in English: Technique of Scientific Work) calls immediately to mind the tradition of note taking growing out of the scientific historical methods work of Bernheim and Langlois/Seignobos and even more specifically the description of note taking by Beatrice Webb (1926) who explicitly used the phrase "recipe for scientific note-taking".

see: https://hypothes.is/a/BFWG2Ae1Ee2W1HM7oNTlYg

first reading: 2022-08-23 second reading: 2022-09-22

I suspect that this translation may be from Clemens in German to Scheper and thus potentially from the 1951 edition?

Heyde, Johannes Erich. Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens; eine Anleitung, besonders für Studierende. 8., Umgearb. Aufl. 1931. Reprint, Berlin: R. Kiepert, 1951.

Interesting choice of translation for "Die Kartei" by the translator. Some may have preferred the more direct "file".

Historically for this specific time period, while index cards were becoming more ubiquitous, most of the prior century researchers had been using larger sheets and frequently called them either slips or sheets based on their relative size.

Beatrice Webb in 1926 (in English) described her method and variously used the words “cards”, “slips”, “quarto”, and “sheets” to describe notes. Her preference was for quarto pages which were larger pages which were likely closer to our current 8.5 x 11” standard than they were to even larger index cards (like 4 x 6".

While I have some dissonance, this translation makes a lot of sense for the specific time period. I also tend to translate the contemporaneous French word “fiches” of that era as “sheets”.

See also: https://hypothes.is/a/OnCHRAexEe2MotOW5cjfwg https://hypothes.is/a/fb-5Ngn4Ee2uKUOwWugMGQ

Early discussion of differential publication frequency